Jack Schneider

Areas of Expertise & Civic Involvements

Schneider’s research broadly examines the influence of rhetoric, politics, history, and culture on educational policy. Recently, he has focused particularly on the measurement of school quality. How does the public get information about schools? What measurement tools do policymakers rely on? How does the information included in educational data systems align with what people actually value? What are the intended and unintended consequences of standardized testing? Working with the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, Schneider co-founded the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, which seeks to move beyond test scores in measuring school quality -- providing rich, comprehensive, fair, and useful information to stakeholders.

Briefs

Key Publications

Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Reframes current debates over school quality by offering new approaches to educational data that push past the unproductive fixation on test scores. Develops a new framework to more fairly and comprehensively assess educational effectiveness.

Answers the question: how is it that Americans both embrace and revile educational assessment? Examines the pressures of consumerism and entrepreneurialism, merit and social mobility, open-access egalitarianism, and local control on assessment culture.

Argues that research is often applied when scholars know how to make their work visible to teachers, friendly to their worldview, practical for use by K-12 schools, and easy to share, but this doesn't ensure the quality or effectiveness of the research.

From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education (Harvard Education Press, 2014).

Explores the relationship between research and practice in education, outlining challenges and opportunities for moving scholarship into K-12 classrooms.

Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers is Transforming America’s Public Schools (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011).

Reveals the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the contemporary school reform movement, using three high-profile reforms as case studies.

"Innovative and Alternative Methods of Assessing Student and School Success," Testimony before Special Senate Committee on Innovative and Alternative Education, Massachusetts State Legislature, September 22, 2015.